“There are cultures in which it is believed that a name contains all a persons mystical power. That a name should be known only to God and to the person who holds it and to very few privileged others. To pronounce such a name either ones own or someone else's is to invite jeopardy. This it seemed was such a name.”

“Emmeline didn't call me anything. She didn't need, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.”

“It gave me a queer feeling. Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person ― some stranger ― had gone to the trouble of marking my name on this envelope.”

“A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.”

“One gets so used to one's own horrors, one forgets how they must seem to other people.”

“My story - my own personal story - ended before my writing began. Storytelling has only ever been a way of filling in the time since everything finished.”

“The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone to feeling in her own holiness to notice any other failings she might have had. She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”